Some of the most serious problems facing 21st century America

As we come to the end of this first decade of the 21st century, we may look back with gladness at all humanity has thus far accomplished, but we also may look forward with determination at the many problems which have yet to be faced down. Of the most serious problems facing the United States of America as we progress into the 21st century, I have chosen to discuss today those which I consider most pressing. These problems are: the Environment, Poverty, and Education. Each of these general problems contains more specific issues. Environmental problems include global warming, the use of dirty and polluting sources of fuel such as oil or coal, and strip-mining. Problems connected with poverty include the widening gulf of inequality between the rich and the poor, an educational system which could be greatly improved, and lack of a living wage and adequate healthcare. Problems connected with the United States’s educational system are: poverty, lack of quality education, poor graduation rates, failure to instill intellectual curiosity, failure to instill a sense of civic responsibility, and lack of access to higher education. These three main issues, which we in the 21st century have been faced with to solve, are rather complex and sometimes interconnected. In my investigation of these problems, I will begin with the beginning: humankind’s haven, mother earth.

The most pressing problem presently facing earth’s environment is global warming. Global warming is caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases can be added to the atmosphere by humanity’s automobiles and factories in quantities far greater than nature by itself could produce. These gases thicken earth’s atmosphere, and this thicker atmosphere causes more of the sun’s energy to be trapped within the atmosphere of the earth. As more of the sun’s energy becomes trapped, the earth heats up and its climate changes from colder to warmer. There has been speculation that a change in climate from warmer to colder is what caused the extinction of the cold-blooded dinosaurs and led to the rise of the warm-blooded mammals. What effect could this latest change in climate, produced by man-made global warming, have upon human beings?

The answer is not a pleasant one. Warmer temperatures could cause the great expanses of ice in Antarctica and in Greenland to melt. A massive influx of fresh water into earth’s oceans would certainly raise the water level of these oceans, and as a result many lands that human beings inhabit could become flooded by rising water. The millions of refugees that escape the floods will have to pour into the surrounding lands, causing a refugee crisis in many countries. The flooding will affect lands around the world, from southern Florida and New York City to Japan and southeastern Asia. Other effects of global warming are supposed to be stronger and more frequent hurricanes and tropical storms, an expansion of tropical diseases, an extremely unequal distribution of water (with some places suffering from devastating droughts and others from massive flooding), and the retreat of glaciers.

Obviously, global warming is a problem of utmost importance. It threatens the earth itself and calls into question the assumption that earth will be livable in the future. To prevent global warming from getting overly out of hand, action needs to be taken by governments and by ordinary citizens to find solutions. The best place to look to find solutions is at the causes. It seems to me that global warming is predominantly caused by human pollution and by human overpopulation of the earth. Overpopulation of the earth can be dealt with in a few ways, some of which are within human control and some of which are not. Pandemics of diseases, which can often be outside of mankind’s control, are a rather terrifying solution to overpopulation. Another solution is the limiting, by law, of how many children each person can have. Communist China, which is already plagued by over-crowding, has limits in place to control its population growth. However, the problem with this solution is that it is not compatible with the ideals of liberty and freedom espoused by western democracies. But something must be done to limit the uncontrolled growth of human beings, or we will eventually smother the planet and ourselves. A greater population of earth has created a greater amount of pollution. This pollution is the primary cause of global warming (and many other environmental problems). Some of the ways in which pollution could be lessened are: limiting the population of the earth, instituting a “carbon tax” to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, increasing mileage standards for polluting automobiles, increasing usage of clean electric cars, and developing clean and renewable sources of fuel such as wind, solar, and geothermal energy.

The issue of energy is intricately connected with the environmental issue. Coal, oil, and other fuels that create hazardous pollutants and greenhouse gases have the ability to destroy our environment, in addition to being an unstable source of fuel which we must import and which we must depend upon erratic Middle Eastern countries for. The use of coal and oil as our primary sources of energy threaten the United States’s national security in more ways than one. Over the next few decades of this 21st century, it will be necessary for the United States to transition to cleaner and more stable fuels. Thousands of wind mills will have to be constructed in North Dakota, in Texas, in Kansas, and in other windy states across the nation. Solar collectors and solar cells can be made more efficient and economical so that buildings and homes across the nation can be powered by almost unlimited energy from the sun. In Iceland, almost 80 percent of the homes get their heat and hot water directly from hot springs and geysers; can’t the United States work to increase its use of the geothermal heat of the earth? There are many clean options for energy and yet we continue to use the fossil fuels which may come to endanger our very existence. Despite an abundance of other options, mankind continues abusing its home planet with dirty pollutants.

Aside from pollutants and their effects (among these being global warming), a further manifestation of human abuses of planet earth is strip-mining, in which human beings plunder the earth for its precious resources, sacrificing natural beauty in the process. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., described the problem of strip-mining as an “Appalachian Apocalypse” because it primarily affects the mountainous regions of Appalachia, where there are plenty of resources to mine from the fruitful mountains. I have seen the strip-mining that takes place in East Tennessee, where in some places large parts of mountains are torn away; and the land of East Tennessee is not unique in that respect. Not only does strip mining tear apart the natural beauty of America’s mountains, it also impoverishes the people of Appalachia, who are having significant resources removed from them when strip-mining occurs. Mining companies and corporations come to Appalachia, strip away the resources, and then take these resources to be used in another part of the country. That is how things have been for decades, ever since the commencement of the Industrial Age. I think that (along with global warming and polluting forms of energy) strip-mining, and other types of wrongful exploitation of earth’s natural resources and wrongful destruction of earth’s natural beauty in general, is another problem to be solved during the 21st century.

Of course, if environmental problems are not solved and the earth is destroyed by global warming and human pollution, then every other problem that I discuss here will become absolutely irrelevant. No one would have to worry about those living in poverty and despair if there was no one living. As it is presently, there is plenty of worrying to be done about the approximately 37 million people who are living in poverty in the United States. 37 million people are about 12 percent of the entire population. Though no nation can ever fully eradicate the scourge of poverty from its shores, efforts can be made to lessen the terrible plight of those living a substandard economic existence in one of the richest countries on earth. As Robert F. Kennedy said, “Where there is plenty, poverty is evil.” We, as Americans living in a materially-rich country, have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate than ourselves. The poverty situation in the United States begs for an answer to two questions. Firstly, how can both excessive economic extravagance and grinding poverty co-exist under this same national roof? And, secondly, how can those living in poverty be helped by the better-off segments of the population?

Excessive riches and exhausted poverty co-exist in the United States due to the widening gulf of inequality between the rich and the poor. In the United States, the economic inequality, or the unequal distribution of wealth, is startling. According to inequality.org and the Economic Policy Institute, “The richest one percent of U.S. households now owns 34.3 percent of the nation's private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent.” Additionally, the top 10% of the people in the United States own 71% of the wealth. That is a striking inequality and indicates the level of concentrated wealth in the United States. And economic inequality always leads to political inequality, due to the power that money has in our government. Inequality compounds upon itself; to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., inequality anywhere is a threat to equality everywhere. What can be done by those living in the 21st century to break up this dense concentration of wealth and power? Since I’m not a candidate for political office, I’m not afraid to suggest that perhaps the richest members of the population should have a significantly higher tax burden than other, relatively-poor members of the population and a higher tax burden than what they have presently. But, the focus of tackling economic inequality should not be bringing down the rich but rather bringing up the poor.

And how do we improve the conditions of our nation’s poor? Again, we need not look any further than the causes for the solutions to this problem. One of the causes of poverty is that the United States’s minimum wage is at such an insufficient level that those earning this wage can’t live off of it. The Democrats have, in the past five years, passed legislation to increase the minimum wage to $6.55 per hour. Despite this, the minimum wage today has less value than the minimum wage decades ago, and, despite this, you can’t live off of the minimum wage. The cost of housing, transportation, food, clothes, and other necessities in life is just too much. If you work at the minimum wage level 40 hours each week, and if you work 365 days in a year (an impossible number), basic math tells you that you’ll still only be making $13,624 each year. As a solution to this problem, the United States could institute a “living wage” (to replace the minimum wage), which would be certified by the Treasury Department that people can live off of it and not live in poverty. The probable level of an hourly living wage would be $12 per hour.

Another cause of poverty in the United States is lack of a sufficient healthcare system.
If a person is not provided with healthcare by their employer, then that can be extremely detrimental to themselves and their family. Lacking healthcare, Americans can become saddled with huge medical costs, aiding the establishment of poverty. As a solution to this problem, it could be mandated by the government that businesses must provide healthcare and all other such benefits for their workers, but that would be saddling businesses with a cost that would make them less competitive in the world. Perhaps a better solution would be a single-payer, universal healthcare system—provided by the government to protect its citizens and its industry, and extending benefits to all areas of health, from eyeglasses to dental.

However, the most important cause of poverty, even more than lack of a living wage or lack of decent healthcare, is lack of opportunity. Opportunity is furnished upon the population by its educational system. And the United States’s educational system, in many areas, is sorely lacking in both the quality of the education and in the quantity of students which graduate from this educational system. As for the quality of education, in some areas it is questionable. While visiting the state of Kentucky in August 2008, I observed a local newspaper article that stated that only 6 percent of Knox County high school seniors were prepared for college-level courses, and that only 17 percent of high school seniors statewide were prepared for college-level courses. That is a poor reflection upon the educational system of the state of Kentucky, for one, and I doubt that Kentucky would be unique in this matter. As for the quantity of students graduating from high school, in some areas these figures are very poor as well. In my home state of Georgia this year, there was a 77 percent high school graduation rate, one of the worst graduation rates in the nation. Consider the other 23 percent of Georgian young adults who failed to graduate from high school. Consider the other students across the nation who fail to graduate from high school. They are condemned to a substandard economic existence. High school drop-outs can only get jobs at McDonald’s or as ditch-diggers but not much anywhere else in this modern world of technology and computerized service industries whose need is skilled workers.

Education is important not only in the realm of economic opportunity and the attainment of jobs. An enlightened citizenry is essential to the continued existence of a democracy and the continued existence of liberty. Only an enlightened population can set about protecting their liberties from abuses by usurping Presidents and acquiescent Congresses (or usurping Congresses and acquiescent Presidents). As Thomas Jefferson said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and what never will be.”
The primary means of enlightening the citizenry is through education. In our educational system, there is not enough emphasis on civics and on the responsibilities of the citizen-student to safeguard their liberties and participate in their government. To remedy this, I think that it would be wise for civics classes to be mandated as a part of the curriculum in elementary school, middle school, and high school.

But education is not meant to simply prepare citizens for jobs or prepare them to protect their liberties; it is meant to teach citizens how to learn, how to be curious, how to think for themselves, how to investigate and question theories and ideas, both old and new. As John Adams said, “There are two types of education. One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live.” Unfortunately, it seems to me, the United States’s education system has been fairly successful in the former type of education but has failed miserably in the latter type of education, which is the most important type of all.

In his 1996 book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, Carl Sagan writes of the difference he sees between first-grade classes and twelfth-grade classes in the American education system: “[First-grade students are] curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm… But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize ‘facts’. By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They’ve lost much wonder and gained very little skepticism…” What has happened in between the fifth grade and the twelfth grade? In between, I think that the natural curiosity of the student (however much there was to begin with would vary with each individual) was stamped upon by drudging rote memorizations of facts and figures, sacrificing intellectual curiosity for teaching to the narrow confines of a test or various tests. Teaching students how to think and how to question is sacrificed in favor of teaching the student to accept a group of repetitious facts which will help them improve their test scores.

Christopher Hedges, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, briefly criticized the standardized test system in a recent book of his. Hedges wrote that, after his son got a critical reading score on the SAT that was less than they had hoped for, he hired a professional SAT tutor for his son. Hedges writes, “The tutor told my son things like, ‘stop thinking about whether the passage is true. You are wasting test time thinking about the ideas. Just spit back what they tell you.’ [Hedges’s son’s] reading score went up 130 points…Had he somehow become smarter thanks to the tutoring? Was he suddenly a better reader because he could quickly regurgitate a passage rather than think about it or critique it? ... Is it really a smart, effective measurement of intelligence to gauge how students read and answer narrowly selected multiple-choice questions while someone holds a stopwatch over them?” In other words, Hedges was criticizing the tests (and furthermore the education system, which focuses on preparation for the tests) for the fact that they did not really allow for any intellectual curiosity or thinking for oneself and instead focused upon regurgitation of facts and figures.

Thus, the major problems that I see in the high school education are poor graduation rates in some areas, poor educational quality in some areas, and failure to promote civic responsibility, and failure to promote intellectual curiosity and thinking for oneself. As for college education, the major problem seems to be lack of access to that higher level of education. The main barrier for most high school graduates upon attempting to gain a college education is, naturally, the high level of expenses that come with tuition, books, and lodging. The high cost of college can make it impossible for poorer students to achieve a college education. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, just 27 percent of adults age 25 and over had a college degree in 2003. To promote college attendance, some states have instituted their own educational scholarships funded by the state lottery. The most notable of these states is Georgia, who provides the HOPE scholarship to all students with a grade point average of 3.0 or higher. This scholarship pays the tuition for the Georgian students’ college, if the college is located within the state of Georgia. Tennessee is also experimenting with a similar system. The question is, why can’t a nationwide HOPE scholarship, or something similar to it, be adopted by the federal government? This would increase access to college education for the students who maintained a decent grade point average in high school, and this would help to improve the general condition of the United States as a whole.

Another solution to increase college access and graduation can be found in the workings of the United States military. A distant cousin of mine recently joined the military just so that he could attain the college education which he would have otherwise been unable to afford. The military, in return for the service, will pay for the soldier’s college education. The question is, why can’t a similar national program of public service be founded where there is no risk of getting killed in some Middle Eastern country thousands of miles from our shores? Participants would enlist in the service of the United States government, in programs where the participants would do many of things that the TVA and PWA and other public works programs used to do during the Great Depression (such as planting trees, building infrastructure, restoring monuments, etc.). In return for their public service (spanning a certain number of months), the participants in this program could then have their college education paid for by the United States government. To achieve funding for this program, other aspects of the federal budget will have to be cut. I’m not sorry to say that the funding for war and for armaments will likely have to be reduced from its present bloated state.

A mention of the highest level of education (college) ought to be followed by a mention of the lowest level of education: pre-school. There is an excellent government program, created by Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, which is meant to give low-income children a “Head Start” on their education. This is an honorable goal. During the 21st century, to further aid our educational system and increase the enlightenment of our population, funding for this “Head Start” program ought to be increased and access to this program considerably expanded.

In the United States during the 21st century, we need to improve both the quality of education and the quantity of people whom education is successfully distributed among. We need to use the educational system to instill intellectual curiosity in American citizens rather than simply instilling in them a grudging respect for rote memorizations of various facts and figures that they will encounter on a test. We need increased access to college education for any American student who has the drive, the determination, and the grades to make it into college. Education in the United States is a complex problem, and, in this 21st century, Americans are going to have to grope for innovative solutions. Some of these future solutions (aside from those that I have already mentioned) may be: increasing federal funding to education, increasing the salaries of teachers, and building more schools so that classes may be of smaller sizes. However, it is beyond my ability to predict the greatest innovations in the future of education.

Now I have discussed some of the astounding problems facing the citizens of the United States as we enter and make ourselves comfortable in the 21st century: (A) the environment, global warming, human pollution and the necessity of human restraint and reform, exploitation of the earth’s natural resources and destruction of the earth’s natural beauty; (B) the terrible condition of poverty which has been shackles upon the bodies and souls of human beings ever since they first began their existence thousands of years ago; and (C) the educational system which fails to instill a sense of civic participation in students, fails to instill a sense of curiosity in students, condemns a significant percentage of students to a substandard economic existence, and is not at its higher levels fully accessible to American students.

The question that ought to be put to us living in the 21st century is: Will we be able to surmount all of these difficult obstacles, for the sake of the survival and of the physical and intellectual well-being of future generations? Personally, I’m an optimist. And I have an optimistic theory about what will occur in the United States during the 21st century. In the American generation that lived immediately after the turbulent events of the Great Depression and of World War II, there was a sense of their living in a post-heroic generation. I am sure that the generation living immediately after the Civil War, and the generation living immediately after the American Revolutionary War, would have felt much the same way: with an acute feeling of living in a post-heroic generation. Eighty-four years passed between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the start of the Civil War. Eighty-one years passed between the time of the start of the Civil War and the time of the start of World War II. Approximately every eighty years, a heroic generation of Americans has come up against and overcome the greatest obstacles that have yet faced the United States. It seems to me that, after the passage of this decade spanning 2009 to 2019, America’s next heroic generation is due to appear. What challenges that generation shall have to face, I do not know; it may be some of the problems which I have noted here, or it may not be. But, whatever the challenges, that generation must rise to the occasion, just as their forefathers did eighty or one-hundred-and-sixty or two-hundred-and-forty years ago, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of future generations existing in the 21st century and onwards, through all time.